Use of Acupuncture in Tennis

With the tight schedule that the professionals, both men and women, have nowadays, injuries become more and more frequent as we could see at every end of the season for the past few years. We had frequently Federer and Nadal missing at the last Masters Series of the year in Paris Bercy, and Nadal even missed last year’s Masters Cup in Shanghai.

It often takes a very longtime to recover from injuries in tennis, since they often involve joints, ankles, neck, shoulders, in short all very sensitive parts of the body. Unfortunately, our common medicine often has no treatment for such injuries besides asking the patient to rest until it goes away. This is one of the reasons why, more and more tennis player started to use alternative medicine, in our case acupuncture. One of the earliest player to use it was all time injured Mary Pierce (FRA) who said after being asked what her biggest problems were:” Probably my back, which kept me out from May 2001 until the start of 2002. Basically it was two discs in my lower spine. One was herniated and the other was bulging. The best thing for this was just to rest, so that’s what I did. This was followed by acupuncture. I am quite a believer in alternative medicine.”

To this list we could add an endless number of names, be it Sania Mirza who when her right wrist fell apart and she was unable to compete after the Olympics last year (thinking her career might be over) visited an acupuncturist during the fall and amazingly recovered and now says she has her full range back. Another one would be Gael Monfils who used it at last year’s US Open to recover after his often exhausting games…

The tennis elbow, one of the most common diseases in tennis is probably also one of the easiest to treat with acupuncture and cupping. It shows a success rate of about 90%. Another name for tennis elbow is epicondylitis. It is due to constant over rotation of the wrist and forearm, which of course is why it is called tennis elbow, since this is one of the basic movements in tennis.Acupuncture tennis elbow treatment works effectively in this condition because it works towards improving the blood flow in the area and also the entire body, in an attempt to provide permanent relief from pain and to decrease effectively inflammation.

So if you too are an all time injured tennis player, it might be worth trying it. I have tried it a couple of times for my shoulders and I have to say it often helped me much more than just some conventional massages, or some expensive laser or ultrasound treatments.